We struggled with long-running, complex builds and difficulty in sharing code across multiple projects. We started using Maven to simplify our builds. This lead to many more benefits that we didn’t expect. It also minimized the overhead costs of extracting, introducing and maintaining new modules. This provided a path for us to move away from a few monolithic slow builds to many small, lightweight fast builds. Using conventions improved cross-team communication. Managing dependencies, versions and performing releases have all become trivial. Maven is a wonderful tool for enhancing agility.

Automating your build process with Continuous Integration is certainly a great idea, but why stop there? Why not go the whole nine yards and automate the deployment process as well? Staging and production deployments are typically more complicated and more involved than a simple development deployment, but doing them by hand can be time-consuming, tricky and error-prone. Indeed, turning your staging and production deployments into a one-click affair has a lot going for it.